There’s groaning. There’s pleading. There’s whining. And constant, inevitable defeat. It doesn’t matter how much protest is raised, barring illness, or any other valid excuse, school is the unstoppable force that pulls students (perhaps with some parental assistance) out of bed in the early mornings.

With grumblings of just how tired they are, students return to school day after day. School is the place where any thirst for knowledge can be satiated, and critical thinking is not only encouraged but nearly crucial.

Once past the threshold of the American classroom, what matters is not just learning facts but learning how to process and apply them.

But venture 5,500 miles away to the archipelago of Japan, and there can be found a much different brand of student to match a different education system.

It’s a land where students rise for school mid-morning but usually don’t return home until nearly 9 at night, because of supplementary school.

And if that weren’t enough, school in Japan is entirely optional. And yet, some 99 percent of students still attend. Students are self-motivated, said economics teacher Steven Worrel, but also face pressure from external sources, like parents and classmates.

“There’s a huge pressure for them to perform,” Worrel said.

Worrel is one of two new teachers at Stagg who have taught in Japan, bringing their experience from the Land of the Rising Sun to sunny California.

He described Japan’s education as a hierarchy based upon one’s intelligence, students being ranked socially by their performance academically.

Of course, students strive to do well for themselves but they are also pinned beneath the heavy order of their parents’ expectations. But parents and offspring aside, students are also perpetually pitted against their classmates.

In Japan, students are ranked by their grade-point average and the ranks are displayed publicly. They compete against one another for the hard won top spot.

In occurrences somewhat backwards to the typical American harassment, students who fall behind are bullied by those academically superior.

It’s done quite covertly, said English teacher Harold Brown, bullying to further put down the struggling student. Having also taught in Japan, he saw his share of bullying.

“They won’t ever admit to not knowing something,” Worrel said, for fear of being thought stupid. Due to this fear, they struggle even more, having only themselves to rely upon as a teacher.

Even if those having difficulties with the curriculum were to speak up, it seems that their teacher may not be the best person to learn from.

Brown describes teachers as almost automata; there to supply information, but offering no analysis or meaning behind the material.

“A teacher’s role is not to lecture,” Brown said. “It is a facilitator.”

Students are not taught to think critically, he added, but rather to memorize, memorize, memorize. An extreme emphasis is placed on rote memorization and testing.

Brown referred to it as a “glorified testocracy,” and then stressed that some students simply don’t test well. The need for verbatim regurgitation of facts may be what generates some of our misconceptions about Japanese students.

“They're like zombies… They just study all the time,” Dominique Terry, senior, said. “They take school way more seriously than we do.”

But Terry’s assumptions that all Japanese students are “super smart” may not be quite that accurate.

“American society’s biggest misconception about students in Japan is probably that they’re all smart,” Worrel said.

However, it’s more the lengths they are willing to go to educate themselves. “They’re hard working. If they don’t know, they find the answer themselves,” Worrel said.

Japanese students, on the whole, are very self-motivated. And even if they weren’t, there would be a classmate around to “motivate” them.

This may account for the fact that Japan’s high school graduation rate is generally a good 20 percent higher than the United States.

But, as with most things under extreme pressure, it’s bound to explode sometime.

In a recent compilation of statistics, the National Police Agency tallied Japan’s total suicide count at 32,155.

Of these, 886 were students, the highest amount among students since the NPA began compiling the numbers in 1978.

Of course, Worrel and Brown hope to avoid any such drastic measures with their own students.

 Despite their differences, Brown says there isn’t such a huge gap between American and Japanese students.

Brown takes to teaching Americans just as he does Japanese, with optimistic perspective and creative teaching methods, because as he said, “You can go anywhere you want to go, because you never know where you’ll end up.”